A broken Google Assistant feature might cost you a good night’s sleep
Google Assistant has a knack for turning almost everything inside your house into a smart piece of hardware, from letting your Bluetooth speaker play songs to your liking to smartening up your bedroom lights with mood-appropriate hues. However, not all of these smart functionalities worked perfectly all of the time, as evidenced by an incident early last year that left Nest Hub ownersunable to set timers on their smart displays. A year later,Google Assistantappears to be exhibiting a somewhat similar glitch, this time involving its ability to set sleep timers.
Several users have taken to thisGoogle Nest Community pageto air their disappointment at Assistant’s broken sleep timer functionality (via9to5Google). This feature was introduced in 2017 to allow customers to specify a time when music should stop playing. However, it appears that many of thebest Google Assistant smart speakersare currently unable to do so for unknown reasons.
It should be noted that the voice assistant still acknowledges appropriate commands for this action but eventually fails to do its job. This means that your bedtime playlist will continue to play even if you set a sleep timer. Our own Manuel Vonau can confirm that the sleep timer doesn’t work for him. Worse, after turning on some music and asking Assistant to set a five-minute sleep timer, Assistant instead set anactual timer.
The issue has become widespread since its inception in December, and Google has since been aware of it. In response to a complaint posted on the Nest Community page, a representative from the company confirmed that the search giant is aware of the problem. Most recently, the Made by Google account responded to another Twitter user, acknowledging the sleep timer issue and saying that the company is working on a fix.
It’s unfortunate that the problem has gone unresolved for over a month. However, if users enjoy listening to music before bed, a few workarounds may help them get a good night’s sleep. According to 9to5, it is still possible to stop music from playing after a certain amount of time by creating a Google Assistant routine andadding a delayed command. While it is an annoyance, at least Google isn’t killing a useful feature as itdoes with many others.
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This article is sponsored by Total Wireless.
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